FlashReport Weblog on California Politics

Posted by Jon Fleischman at 12:17 pm on Sep 30, 2011 Comments Off on San Diego Pension Reform Group Turns in 145K+ Signatures to Qualify for Ballot

In a striking blow to the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor
Council and Labor Union bosses around the state, the San Diego
Pension Reform measure appears to be on its way to the ballot box
this morning.

Comprehensive Pension Reform (CPR) for San Diego is announcing
at this moment that the campaign turned in a whopping 145,027
signatures to the San Diego City Clerk’s office early this morning
to qualify the measure for the June 2012 ballot.

More than 120,000 of those signatures have been verified already
using a 100% signature verification method, according to the CPR
campaign. The 145,000+ signature turn-in is well in excess of the
94,346 valid signatures which are required to place the measure on
the ballot.

In a failed effort that received much media attention, public
employee union bosses attempted to keep this and other measures off
the ballot by running phony radio ads to scare people from signing,
over fear of identity theft. Today’s overwhelming turn-in proves
that labor’s efforts to intimidate and deceive voters were trumped
by the desire of citizens to achieve real pension reform.… Read More

I’m a car guy. Most of you know this. However, I’ve recently
become the housing guy in Washington. This is not due to any direct
background or experience. I have only bought 3 and sold 2 houses in
my life, all of in which the captivating Mrs. Campbell and I have
lived. It is partly because I serve on the committee that deals
with such issues. But, it is mainly because I know we never go into
recessions without housing and cars leading us in, and we never
recover without housing and cars leading us out. These two
industries are just too big a part of the economy and too important
to the psyche of consumers. The car business is doing better of
late, but housing is not. There are many reasons our economy
stinks, but one of them is certainly because the housing market is
still in a decline. The economy will not be strong again until we
turn it around.

When you have a sick patient, the first rule is, “Do no harm”.
The housing market is sick. Much of what is causing this sickness
is the fact that the housing finance system, anchored by Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac, failed. We have to replace that system. As
many of you know, I have a… Read More

I don’t usually comment on federal issues, finding as I do
enough material in the strange stuff going on around me in
Sacramento. But with the Legislature out of session and your
pocketbook safe for a while, I thought I would note a bizarre
comment recently from our beleaguered president. It’s worth noting,
I think, both because it is typical of the arguments we often hear
from the left, and because of what it says about the president’s
respect for the intelligence of the American people.

The subject the president was addressing was immigration,
specifically, the federal version of the so-called Dream Act. More
generally, he was defending himself from the charge that he was
somehow to blame for the current confused immigration situation
that satisfies neither the left nor the right. And according to the
White House web site’s transcript of the president’s comments, the
comments I find curious, he said in defense, “I just have to
continue to say this notion that somehow I can just change the laws
unilaterally is just not true.”

Now, of course, precisely NO ONE of any sense, stature, or IQ
above room temperature has ever expressed “this notion.”… Read More

CalBuzz has a lead item in today’s website entitled “Lies, Damn
Lies: Howard Jarvis and Small Biz ‘Poll”. However, the
picture of Jarvis that they use to punctuate their accusations
includes an illegal and unauthorized use of the famous picture of
Howard Jarvis that appeared in Time magazine, which is copyrighted
material and privately owned by the HJTA and another
organization. We were told the picture was sourced from the
Google Images Library. The Google images Library clearly
instructs any potential user that the picture “may be subject to
copyright” and reports the picture back to a website that firmly,
very clearly asserts a copyright on the picture and states “All
material on this website is copyrighted.” One would think the
experienced journalists at CalBuzz would understand copyrights for
journalistic materials, including those clearly marked as
such. CalBuzz says they will remove the offending material
“by noon,” but all the damage will be done by then, when the
website has received the majority of it’s page views.
Beware a message of “lies, damn lies” that comes from a source… Read More

Posted by Jon Fleischman at 10:06 am on Sep 28, 2011 Comments Off on “Legion of Acceptability” Meets on KFI Radio’s John and Ken Show

Yesterday at 5pm, KFI radio talk show hosts John Kobylt and Ken
Chiampou hosted Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist, Howard
Jarvis Taxpayers Association’s Jon Coupal, and yours truly for a
fun segment — united a group of anti-tax leader that were dubbed by
Governor Jerry Brown as the “Legion of Acceptability” — Joe
Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about that
here.

The premise of Brown’s assertion is that our group of taxpayer
advocates is responsible for stopping his play to put taxes
increases on a special election ballot this year. The reality
is that the vast majority of GOP legislators opposed these tax
increases because they are bad public policy, not because of
anything printed here on the FlashReport or spoken on the John and
Ken Show. Those few GOP legislators who were willing to put
taxes on the ballot were thwarted by the public employee
unions,… Read More

Posted by Ron Nehring at 9:27 pm on Sep 26, 2011 Comments Off on The Solyndra Green Jobs Fiasco

Solyndra is the kind of company certain politicians love because
it provides a concrete example that can be used to justify a
particular philosophy. It turns an abstract idea real.

In this case, the philosophy is one which liberals have
developed to rationalize all types of regulations and subsidies of
the kind America has otherwise spent fifty years moving away
from. “Green jobs,” the story line goes, will be our
future.

It sounds great. And politically, it’s even better: it’s
suddenly acceptable to crush all kinds of businesses with
regulations and taxes because the jobs that are destroyed will be
replaced will all kinds of new “green jobs.” Everything will
be fine. In his 2010 campaign for Governor, Democrat Jerry
Brown citied such idealistic, clean, high-tech jobs almost
daily.

Yet, “green jobs” is an abstract concept, and one which has
proven to be largely a failure in the real economy. At best
they occupy a niche, and no credible economic analysis can
demonstrate a roadmap by which such jobs become anything more than
a tiny sector of our giant economy.

We all are familiar with the rest of the variations on this
phrase describing the dedication of the US Postal Service (USPS) in
delivering the mail. Well, snow and rain may not be keeping the
Post Office from delivering the mail, but financial problems within
the USPS may soon halt delivery.

This has not gotten much publicity, but the USPS is in real
trouble. The USPS is an independent, but wholly-owned entity of the
federal government. It is designed to be self-supporting such that
the rates it charges will cover the costs of delivering the mail.
This worked for a long time. Obviously, for over 200 years. But,
not so now. After earning modest profits from 2004-2006, the agency
started hemorrhaging money in 2007. Between 2007 and 2010, it has
lost over $20 billion. These losses are now accelerating in 2011
with a loss, in the first 3 quarters of this year, amounting to
$5.7 billion. The USPS has already borrowed the maximum $15 billion
it is allowed to borrow under the law and has already deferred
another $4 billion in payments to its employee retirement fund to
cover these losses. The Continuing Resolution adopted by the House
last week… Read More

Posted by James V. Lacy at 8:42 am on Sep 26, 2011 Comments Off on Obama California “ATM” spitting out more cash today

Barack Obama continues to ring-up his California Automated
Teller Machine. despite record 12.1% unemployment here punctuated
by almost 50% employment among high school age black men,
with fundraisers planned in the higher employment environs of San
Diego County and Hollywood.

Today the President of Hope, whose current Misery Index economic
number here is higher than the number that inspired Jimmy Carter to
use the data to defeat Gerald Ford for President in 1976, lunches
at noon at the mansion residence of Elizabeth and Mason Phelps in
the 1400 block of La Jolla Rancho Road in La Jolla. (Maureen
Guffanti of the Tea Party informs us that a public protest is
planned down the street.)… Read More